Friday Note: 8/27/2021
A special thanks to all our employees helping Afghans and their families find safety in our community. The Pacific Northwest is one of only a handful of regions in the U.S. welcoming refugee families and our Refugee Resettlement Services staff are ramping up efforts to support them.
If you are asked, these are the Top 3 opportunities for people to support the Afghan refugees:
- Provide affordable or no-cost housing or be a host home family
- Commit to extended volunteer support (ideally, 2-4 weeks at a time). Volunteers are needed to work with our community partners to coordinate "restart kits," which include necessities like bedding, kitchen and bathroom supplies. We also need mentor volunteers to be a long-term friend in the community to these families.
- Donate money that will go to support the massive effort of resettling families
Bonus - we are in need of storage so we can have furniture and welcome kits ready and staged across the i5 corridor between Seattle and Portland.
Mouammar:
"This crisis is unprecedented and wonderful work is being done--under incredibly tight timelines--to make resources and support available."
"The phone and emails don’t stop coming. We coordinated support for 24 Afghans last week. So far this week, we received a family of three, a family of four, and another family of four. We anticipate up to 50 people a month, and it could go even higher. Often, we only have 24-hour notice that we will be receiving a family."
"We are grateful for the community support. What we need is more capacity--we could use more people to respond to phones and emails and to coordinate the support coming in."
"There are very high expectations in the community for how we resettle these families. LCSNW has the most experience resettling Afghans in the PNW, and we are happy to do this work. We are excited. My team is working very hard and we have a lot of joy seeing families get houses and the support they need."
Lisa:
"Portland hasn’t seen any arrivals yet and we're using this time to prepare. When the families come in, they will need all sorts of support on all levels. While the first touchpoint is Refugee Resettlement services, refugee families can be helped by all our services and, in some way, we'll all end up serving them."
"Please give the people on the ground grace. We've had such a beautiful response from our community and managing that is a lot of work."
"If you're not familiar with working with refugee families, please feel free to call me! I fully believe in collaboration and I'm grateful for all our staff and partners."
I am so proud of everyone's efforts and grateful for this team.
David
Health, Justice and Hope
We have many former clients reached us for further information supporting to their families in Afghanistan and the support available to those who are in here. These former clients also mentioned their struggle from income loss (job loss) due to this crisis news from their families back in Afghanistan & crisis in here for themselves are encountering. A lot of mental health was mentioned and the need to create culturally appropriate mental health support group that reaches men and women in the Afghan community combined this with resources support broken families in here and there during this crisis.
ReplyDeleteI deeply feel sad for this crisis like many people. It reminds me being a refugee, the difficult times refugees have. I am always proud and count on the resettlement agencies and the mainstream communities their positive contribution.